Quotes About Prejudice

I hated Duke, and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn't recruit players like me.

I think women were just accepted more as songwriters when they sat on a stool with a guitar and had scruffy hair. It was quite insulting really, because it was like saying that if you're pretty and slim and glamorous there's no way anything could be going on between your ears, you just like doing your makeup.

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.

In America, I've been told so many times that I look 'too Jewish' that I stopped counting.

Men and women wonder if merely walking or driving justifies being followed, stopped, or questioned. This practice and the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color must come to an end.

It is not legitimate that an American citizen feels that they are more likely to be arrested or held to account or stopped and searched than someone else simply because of the color of their skin.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

I was eight years old when I got the talk about what to do if a police officer stops me. I was 15 when I was face-down on the curb for the first time.

There are so many things to talk about between black people, Hispanic people, white people, gay people, men, women, it's all based on fear. We all have fears, this thing that stops us from embracing as we are one. We are never going to be one. People are messed up, but humor lets us see how ignorant we can be.

It's something that black men still go through to this day, which is women clutching their purses, hitting the lock button on store, or just basic attitudes. And even as a U.S. congressman, as a black man, it is very, very frustrating, and you build up an internal anger about it that you can't act on.

I've numerous times heard mothers in stores tell their children not to go near me.

I had no idea what I was gonna do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time, if you were a Chinese-American, even department stores wouldn't hire you. They'd come right out and say, 'We don't hire Orientals.'

When I first met Alan Parker, who directed 'Angel Heart,' he'd heard so many horror stories about me that he was literally scared to death of me. Right away, he sat me down and said, 'I'm very scared of you. I've heard you're a very bad boy.'

The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.

I don't care if you're gay, black, Chinese, straight. That means nothing to me. It's all an illusion.

I don't much care who is gay or straight or married or not. I mostly notice if they are brave enough to confront bigotry.

Gay rights is not something most of us think about - because most of us happen to have been born straight.

There is a large group that's not represented on television - the group that falls somewhere in the middle of straight and gay. That group is looked down on, because people say, 'You can't be in-between. You have to pick one or the other.'

I think it shouldn't matter at all what character people play, but of course there is a narrative that's very clear, that openly gay men aren't playing straight in leading roles.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

If a straight man dresses well, chances are he's not straight.

Americans know as much about Canada as straight people do about gays. Americans arrive at the border with skis in July, and straight people think that being gay is just a phase. A very long phase.

Seriously I just don't get why straight people are so afraid of the fact that gay people can get married.